This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries.
Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes

Taught By

Dr Jenny Thomson

Dr Vincent Goetry

Transcript

You need to make sure that the child has a thorough understanding of the alphabet when you teach the alphabet. So many children with dyslexia will be able to recite the alphabet, but what you will notice is that contrary to non-dyslexic readers, they will not be able to tell you which letter comes before a target letter or after a target letter. Or if you ask them to recite the alphabet from the letter, say, N, you will be able to tell that they need to start at the beginning of the alphabet on, come to the N, and then they will recite it. For all the pupils, you can ask them more difficult question, like say the alphabet in the reverse order. Now, of course, this is also complicated for non-dyslexic readers, but with dyslexic readers, you are going to notice that they abandon very quickly. But if you think about it, a thorough understanding of the alphabet and knowledge of the alphabet is paramount for many things like looking up for a word in the dictionary, filing files. There's many lists on the internet classified by alphabetical order, so it is paramount that you can do it for five minutes a day, work on the alphabet. Now, when you use the alphabet, as you see in the film, you ask the children to lay the alphabet in the shape of a rainbow, of an arc. Because if you ask the child to put the letters of the alphabet in a line, they will have to make movements with their eyes. Although when you do it in a rainbow shape, with a single glance at the alphabet, they will be able to see all the letters. You can carry out many, many, many activities, multisensory activities. I'm just going to give you a couple of examples. For example, the pupils can lay all the letters out, and then they name each one while putting their hands on their mouth and their throat to feel the movements associated with the pronunciation of each letter. This activity obviously involved aural kinesthetic modality and manual kinesthetic modality which are underused usually in the classroom. Now, more difficult, lay out the letter in sequence, recite them, and then ask the children to close their eyes and say what letters come before another. If they get stuck, ask them to feel the letter, or you can directly ask them to close their eyes or put a blindfold as you see in the film and give them a letter, and the child has to feel the letter with their hands, with their fingers and guess what letter it is. And you can do a nice activity with several pupils. You will have a word in your head, and you give the first letter to the first child, the second letter to the second child, etc. They need to listen to each other. They need to retain what the letters of the word are, and then, when they put all the letters together, they will come up with the word you wanted them to guess. The fourth point, which is very important, is creating links between graphemes and phonemes using the four modalities which I described in multisensory teaching. Usually what we do is we start with, as you see in the film, again, we start with the auditory modality, and we use the technique of direct discovery. Direct discovery consists in giving several words to the child which share a common phoneme and ask them which is the little sound that you heard in all these words that I just pronounced. For example, you can use five or six or ten words as dragon, grid, dug, undo, drag. Now it is important to have words where the target phoneme is at the beginning, towards the middle, or at the end of the word because then you can ask the children to do phonological, phonemic analysis, and you can ask to each of the children in turn, well, in dragon, is the target sound [SOUND] at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the word? Then you move on to the visual modality. Then you can, as you see in the film again, you can provide a sheet to the children with all the words you have used in the auditory discovery, and you ask the children not to read the words but just to circle the letter or the group of letters, the graphing, corresponding to the phoneme you have just been working on. So this is linking the auditory to the visual modality. The manual kinesthetic modality comes next. You can ask the children, depending on the materials that you have, you can ask the children to write the letter, the grapheme on the rough surface in a sand tray. Or, as you see in the film, in the air with one arm on the elbow of the other arm, and then they trace the letter in the air with their eyes open, with their eyes closed. This is really interesting for stimulating the manual kinesthetic modality and the unconscious muscular movements, which the children are going to record to be able to trace those letter. Now, let's move to the fourth modality, the aural kinesthetic modality. As you've seen in the film, we have done this with children. It's not easy at the beginning because even adults do not pay attention to the position of their articulators, the throat, the mouth, the tongue, the teeth, the lips when they utter a phoneme. So, it's going to need a little bit of practice for the first phonemes, which you're going to analyze this way. But be patient, and the children will get used to that, and it's paramount to do that with dyslexic learners because they will have additional clue to be able to build stronger representations of phonemes in their brain. So you can use what you see in the film. Put your hands on your throat. Put your hands on your cheeks, and let's try to see what happen, and you can use contrastive phonemes to make them aware that with [SOUND], for example, we utter the sound to what's the middle of the mouth, and there is vibration of the vocal cords as opposed, for example, [SOUND], when there is no vibration of the vocal cords, but it's uttered also towards the middle of the mouth. Then you can do what you seen in the film also, a tracking exercise. So you will mix up several shapes of the target graphing phoneme link you are studying with the children, and you can have, for example, the letter D in various shapes, sans serif, with serif, in different fonts, and you mix the Ds with other letters of the alphabet, and you ask the children to track the letters. Now, this has two advantages. The child is going to recognize the various forms of the letter D, and the second thing is that you are training the movements of cursive writing by doing this. So you ask them to start on the line, and they draw a line, and each time they see a D, they catch it, and then they go on to the next slide. You can also do auditory discrimination, so you introduce the children with a few pictures and you say, do we find the sound [SOUND] in the word corresponding to these pictures. This is called auditory discrimination. The fifth point to remember is that one of the best tools frequently used in multisensory method is a set of reading and spelling cards. You have seen a short sequence in the film revising the reading card, so the reading cards are really important. It's a tool which is going to give some autonomy to the children, and that's very important. They will have a feeling of control over their learning. And because I've been working for several years supporting children with dyslexia, I could really tell the difference between the children who were revising the reading cards frequently and the children who did not. Having a reading card and then afterwards or spelling cards, which I am going to talk about in a moment, is really important for reinforcing the grapheme phoneme correspondences. It's a over learning. It's what we call a novel learning tool because these connections are very difficult to learn for dyslexic learners. The pack of spelling cards is slightly different as you can see on this slide. Here we are a few examples. When you teach the spelling of phonemes, you start always with the more frequent graphemes. So for example, if you want to teach the corresponding F. You are going to start with the letter F, but [SOUND] can also be in a subsequent lesson. You will introduce a less frequent spelling like F-F as in cliff, and then you will introduce P-H as in photograph. For some correspondences, you also have exception. I suggest that you don't put these on the spelling cards because this is going to induce confusion. You just see them in the classroom. Another positive aspect of reading cards at least is that the child is completely independent. She can review the reading cards every day after school. It takes no longer than three minutes. The principle is to look at the card, say the clue word, say the phoneme, and then turn over the card to see whether the answer was correct. So this is also a self-correction tool, which makes the children independent. For the spelling cards, the child needs an aid, so you or the parents are going to say the phoneme, and the children need to write the grapheme or graphemes corresponding to that phoneme. For example for F, for [SOUND], sorry, you ask them to write all the possibilities, and they should write the letter F, double F, and P-H.

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